Getting Started
Editing with FANDOM Creator All editing via FANDOM Creator is designed to be "WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean)." Simply put, this means that you tell the editor what you are trying to do, and it will ensure that your intent is rendered well in all contexts. The editing experience in is built to be both flexible and powerful, without needing to learn any special syntax or markup. If there's something you want to do to a page that isn't implemented within the experiment yet, or if you're looking for the Source Mode editor to accomplish a task that you can't accomplish here, please . We are continually improving and expanding upon this experiment and this is your chance to help shape the editing experience! Editing Tools Menu From left to right: Paragraph / Heading / Sub-heading / Quote Bold Italic Insert Footnote Numeric List Bulleted List Un-indent List Indent List Insert Link Insert Image Insert Video Data-driven widgets (see "Querying" below) Metadata aka "Infobox" Most pages are about a "thing" in the world - a person, a place, a TV episode, etc. These "things" have attributes that are worth sharing, whether it be a character's age, a book's publishing date, or a TV Episode's runtime. The Infobox is the best place to share this data. To get started, click . You'll get a dialog asking for the name of the thing you are trying to add (the bit that will appear in bold) and the associated value (the bit that will appear on the right side of the infobox). Fill them in and hit save. Now, you'll have one of these: You can click the pencil to update the row. And once you've got a couple of rows, you can use the drag handle on the left to re-order the rows. Metadata Types Hang on... we know from Aaliyah that "age ain't nothin' but a number," yet users that come to Fandom can easily do things like this: To help guide contributors to adding good data, you can set a 'Type' for the row. Hit that pencil, then click the "Define" button in the upper-right. You'll get a dialog that looks something like this: Many types are available today, with more planned for the future. If you pick (and save) something simple here, other contributing fans will now be gracefully guided into providing better information when they edit the row. One of our favorite row types is 'Color' - try it out! Once you've added rows and defined the inputs within the Infobox for everything interesting about your topic, not only will it look great and help other contributors input good content, but it will also unlock the power of another feature: queries. Queries and Widgets Under the "three dots" within the Editing Tools menu, you'll find a bunch of data-driven widgets that can be used. Let's start by showing you how to create a table. Once you've mastered that, we encourage you to use the same steps with a different widget! Tables For those coming from the MediaWiki world, you know that there are many uses for organizing data into tables. However, creating and maintaining them can be challenging. Take, for example, a TV show. You created a page about the first season of the show and would like to have a table showing the season's episodes. With the other editors, every time a new episode aired, someone would have to go back to the Season One page and add it to the table. Not easy! FANDOM Creator makes this easier. Selecting 'Table' will give you a dialog similar to this: The left drop-down has a list of every metadata row name that exists on the site. The middle drop-down has things like "equals", or "is greater than", etc. On the right is a text field where you can type whatever you like. Plus, there's so much more. There's a way to make more complex queries, and an advanced tab for fans who get really serious about data. For now, we can ignore those. To continue adding a Table, select 'Season' in the left drop down, and type '1' in the text box on the right. Hit save, et voila! A table widget has been created! Space within the editor is often a bit cramped, so the table will look small while you're editing. However, when you save your page... You've got a complete table of episodes in Season 1 that never needs to be updated again! Whenever a new episode is added, and someone puts '1' into the 'Season' row, it will show up here automatically. Now that you've got the basics, we encourage you to try out different widgets with the same queries, or try out crazy complex queries. If you're brave enough to dig into the Advanced tab, you'll see that any query generated in the 'Basic' tab automatically carries over to the Advanced tab. The query language is based on , and should be an easy learn if you're the sort of person who likes to read RFC's. And remember, please if you run into any issues or you cannot accomplish what you were hoping to with this experiment.